shpalman (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} shpalman) wrote,@ 2007-10-20 09:16:00 |
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| Entry tags: | badscience, religion, science |
Well that about wraps it up
So there's another thread at badscience.net and it drifted into a discussion about how scientists with religious beliefs can reconcile the two things. I'm with J. B. S. Haldane, who said
“My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.”
I'm going to try to summarize my position and respond to other viewpoints by paraphrasing rather than quoting anyone else's contributions to the thread, firstly to make it more self-contained and easier to follow, and secondly not to take anyone else's words out of context without asking. They can always add a comment if they really want to. Or set up their own blogs. And you can check my sources.
Actually I ought to say that when I read a scientific paper, I only care about whether what's in the paper is any good or not and it matters not one jot what the authors believe1 - nobody actually writes “we couldn't reproduce this result so we assume an interventionist God only responded to our prayers the first time.” And I don't assume that Lionel Milgrom's quantum homeopathy noodlings ought to mean that his work on the chemistry of porphyrins isn't valid, for example. (Although I admit that in practice it's hard to ignore the reputation of an author.)
One standard justification for being atheist is to assert that you want a worldview built on logic and testable hypotheses, not stuff which is made up. My justification is a bit different. I think we ‘know’ that science works (and if you don't believe me, then how do you think you are reading this blog?) but how's the scientific method supposed to work if there's a deity messing about behind the scenes? And if there's a deity which doesn't intervene at all within our experience then why bother taking it into account with the way you do anything?
One kind of worldview might be called ‘experimental theology’ in that (scientific) experiments reveal the way in which God works. But I call the things that experiments reveal ‘laws of nature’ and if you want to call them ‘god’ that's fine but I don't think that's what most people have in mind when they refer to God. But what do most people have in mind when they refer to God? I think a lot of human psychology has been projected onto the judeo-christian god, and it shouldn't entirely be applicable. But anyway. There was a paper in Science (which I blogged about) which reviewed the discord between intuition and science and said that
“... both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and psychological domains”
and that
“... when learning information from other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the source of that information... [children] prefer to learn from a knowledgeable speaker than from an ignorant one, and they prefer a confident source to a tentative one.”
So it's probably true that most people, regardless of the content of their beliefs, will believe whatever fits with their own intuitive worldview when it comes from someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and that most people (without at least a PhD in the relevant subject) have to take what's told to them about ‘How Things Came To Be’ on some level of trust. Some of those things, however, (like relativity or quantum mechanics) are extremely counter-intuitive. Whereas stories about intelligent agencies doing stuff which is actually only done by dumb physical laws fit right in with our intuitive worldview, which pays more attention to the actions of other humans and tends to see patterns even when they are not there.
For many religious people, their religious teachings will have provided reliable advice, knowledge and guidance in areas of their life which they do know something about. Based on that, it's not illogical to apply those same teachings and ideas to an area they don't know about and can't test themselves. Creationist religious teachings usually claim to be a reliable source of knowledge about the world. They are keen to assure that God's Word as revealed in the Bible is completely reliable on the details of Creation, since unlike scientists who have to make guesses, God was supposedly there at the time.
Well religion sometimes seems to claim (falsely) to have a monopoly on morality and living a good and fulfilling life - and priests/ministers/vicars often turn out to be good counsellors. I don't really have a problem with whatever gets people through the day, except when they (often hypocritically) go against science - which I think is what the thread was about in the first place. However, I think people should get their advice, knowledge and guidance from people who really understand how human psychology is, not from people who have a slightly idealized (and sometimes hypocritical) view of how it should be.2
What I'm actually curious about is understanding how scientists with religious views reconcile the two things. I used to think it was possible but I changed my mind when I learnt a little bit more about quantum mechanics and determinism versus predictability and that. Maybe I'm reducing things to an absurdity, but it seems to me that if all God does all day is make sure that everything happens exactly according to the physical laws then that seems like a really really boring job. One viewpoint seems to me to be that God intervene but only when a scientist isn't watching carefully. Or is it a ‘fuzzy signal’ such that God can command or intervene, but not all the time because that would turn the universe into nothing but a doll's house, making it hard to tell what God is actually doing? Does that mean that since the enlightenment, with natural philosophers wandering about paying attention to everything, God has had to ease off a bit to avoid being found out? (I think sometimes God gets the credit when people are just being nice to each other.) Another viewpoint seems to be to assume that God can act in any system too complicated for us to have been able to predict what was going to happen, like in a human brain or a country full of people. But I think that these systems are deterministic anyway even if they are unpredictable.
God is supposedly outside of time (as well as space) so it's not quite analogous to setting something off and knowing exactly what is going to happen in a sequence of events. Maybe it's like drawing something in CorelDRAW (other drawing packages are available) - if there's a bit which needs to go in but doesn't fit you can rearrange the bits you've already done to make space. However I think that this implies that you might as well try to change the past as change the future when you pray.
I'm not trying to project any of these viewpoints onto anyone, I'm just ‘showing my working’ regarding my atheistic viewpoint. It overlaps with agnosticism in the sense that there could be a God who is acting with a vanishingly small influence, or who lit the blue touch paper 15 billion years ago and stood back, but in those cases his existence or otherwise has no bearing on my life now so I'm going to ignore it. But I have thought about it, and I know what I believe, and I'm comfortable with it.
Now we come onto the subject of why scientists don't always apply scientific thinking towards their beliefs. Perhaps they're a bit dualist and think that some things are ‘spiritual’ or whatever and out of the realm of scientific applicability. Or that it would somehow be wrong or missing the point to analyse your relationship with God in the same way that it would feel wrong to analyse your relationships with other people.
I understand why it would be inappropriate to actually psychologically test your relationships, but I'm interested in knowing what sort of psychology is going on which makes someone feel like its inappropriate (or missing the point) to argue the existence of God. Is God going to be offended by the implied lack of trust or something? I'm about to have a cup of tea - testing it by mass spectrometry to find out what's in it would be to miss the point of the experience but I don't think there's anything supernatural about tea.
- The postmodernists think that facts only exist when they are discovered, and the facts which are discovered depend on the prejudices of the scientists doing the discovering, or something. Lionel Milgrom is of this opinion, stating that “All truth, even scientific truth, is relative not absolute,” (which may be true for him, but it isn't true for everyone) “which is the reason why science progresses.” Science progresses because we get better approximations to and knowledge of the truth.
- There may be a good evolutionary reason why humans believe in moralizing gods.
